Tag Archives: mid-term review

It’s been a big week for Nick Clegg: the launch of the Government’s Mid-Term ‘Ronseal deal’ Review and his first ‘Call Clegg’ radio phone-in. His latest letter to supporters focuses on these two issues, but also makes a broader point: that coalition government is starting to become accepted, even by the media; that there’s a recognition two parties can disagree on some issues while pursuing a shared agenda on others.

This email would have been the ideal way to share more widely the party’s (excellent) booklet, ‘What have the Liberal Democrats ever done for you?’ — it’s not mentioned at all so here’s the link. For some reason I find baffling there appears still to be a deep-seated reluctance to align these emails with party campaigns or calls to action: the result is Nick on transmit mode, not receive. That’s a shame because the letters are an excellent initiative, and whether actually written by him or not, they read like Nick, are authentic.

I’ve had chance only to scan-read today’s Coalition Mid-Term Review (with its rather grudging, adjective-free title, Stuck Together in the national interest), but here are some initial impressions…

The economy takes centre-stage…

This may seem a statement of the obvious. And yet it’s worth comparing with the May 2010 document, Our programme for government (ahh, that Rose Garden-inspired ‘our’) in which subjects were sorted alphabetically so that you had to wait until chapter 9 to read about ‘deficit reduction’. Back in those days the …